Appraising the Manifestation of Optimism Bias and Its Impact on Human Perception of Cyber Security: A Meta Analysis

Abstract

Cyber threats and risks are increasing exponentially with time. For preventing and defense against these threats and risks, precise risk perception for effective mitigation is the first step. Risk perception is necessary requirement to mitigate risk as it drives the security strategy at the organizational level and human attitude at individual level. Sometime, individuals understand there is a risk that a negative event or incident can occur, but they do not believe there will be a personal impact if the risk comes to realization but instead, they believe that the negative event will impact others. This belief supports the common belief that individuals tend to think of themselves as invulnerable, i.e. , optimistically bias about the situation, thus affecting their attitude for taking preventive measures due to inappropriate risk perception or overconfidence. The main motivation of this me ta-analysis is to assess that how the cyber optimistic bias or cyber optimism bias affects individual’s cyber security risk perception and how it changes their decisions. Applying a meta-analysis, this study found that optimistic bias has an overall negative impact on the cyber security due to the inappropriate risk perception and considering themselves invulnerable by biasing that the threat will not occur to them. Due to the cyber optimism bias, the individual will sometimes share passwords by considering it will not be maliciously used, lack in adopting of preventive measures, ignore security incidents, wrong perception of cyber threats and overconfidence on themselves in the context of cyber security.